Housewife Work Quotes

Good God," I said. "This is the most stereotypical vampire food ever." "Only if it was raw. What do you think?" "It's good," I said reluctantly. Who knew that bacon would have made all the difference? "Really good. I think you have a promising future as a housewife while Lissa works and makes millions of dollars." "Funny, that's exactly my dream.

Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls… searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor… What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.

As a housewife, I feel that if the kids are alive when my husband gets home from work, then hey, I've done my job

I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, “To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour”. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist…

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.

A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world. Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true.

Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

I did not care if Ella went to Princeton, if she was exceptionally pretty, if she grew up to marry a rich man, or really if she married at all - there were many incarnations of her I felt confident I could embrace, a hippie or a housewife or a career woman. But what I did care about, what I wanted most fervently, was for her to understand that hard work paid off, that decency begat decency, that humility was not a raincoat you occasionally pulled on when you thought conditions called for it, but rather a constant way of existing in the world, knowing that good luck and bad luck touched everyone and none of us was fully responsible for our fortunes or tragedies. Above all, I wanted my daughter to understand that many people were guided by bitterness and that it was best to avoid these individuals - their moods and behavior were a hornet's nest you had no possible reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore.

I could write pages and pages about the delights of being a full-time housewife and mother and trying to write and support a family with two babies—but I don’t use that kind of language in public.

Since she became a full-time housewife, she often noticed that there was a polarised attitude regarding domestic labour. Some demeaned it as ‘bumming around at home’, while others glorified it as ‘work that sustains life’, but none tried to calculate its monetary value. Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay.

I have found that there is romance in housework: and charm in it; and whimsy and humor without end. I have found that the housewife works hard, of course–but likes it. Most people who amount to anything do work hard, at whatever their job happens to be. The housewife’s job is home-making, and she is, in fact, ‘making the best of it’; making the best of it by bringing patience and loving care to her work; sympathy and understanding to her family; making the best of it by seeing all the fun in the day’s incidents and human relationships. The housewife realizes that home-making is an investment in happiness. It pays everyone enormous dividends. There are huge compensations for the actual labor involved… There are unhappy housewives, of course. But there are unhappy stenographers and editresses and concert singers. The housewife whose songs I sing as I go about my work, is the one who likes her job (pp. 6-7). From Songs of a Housewife: Poems by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured - the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart - the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but has the excuse of a sister to support - the businessman who hated his business - the worker who hated his work - the intellectual who hated everybody - all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves.

A full-time housewife’s work at home could usually save a family more than she could earn in wages.33

Like racism, sexism is one of the great justifications for high female unemployment rates. Many women are “just housewives” because in reality they are unemployed workers. Cannot, therefore, the “just housewife” role be most effectively challenged by demanding jobs for women on a level of equality with men and by pressing for the social services (child care, for example) and job benefits (maternity leaves, etc.) which will allow more women to work outside the home?

Several studies show that it is a woman's degree of satisfaction with either the housewife role or paid work, and the continuity of her work experience when she does work, that best correlates with positive outcomes in her children.

Every field has its technological advances and evolves in the direction that reduces the amount of physical labor required, but people are particularly reluctant to admit that the same is true for domestic labor. Since she became a full-time housewife, she often noticed that there was a polarized attitude regarding domestic labor. Some demeaned it as “bumming around at home,” while others glorified it as “work that sustains life,” but none tried to calculate its monetary value. Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay.

But when I blinked and focused, all that stared back at me was my own face, reflected in the window. "What if you're a woman," I said, feeling each word like fire in my throat, "and the world teaches you who you are, and where your place is, from the moment you're born, but all along, it's a lie. What if the lie chains you everyday? If you're not thinking straight any minute of your life, and even your defiance, even your pleasure, is suspect?" I pressed my palm against the cold glass. "How does consent work then? What makes you want the things you want? Is it your choice, or were you molded?

The kitchen is your natural setting as a woman and you should look beautiful, not bedraggled, in it. Whether you go to work or work at home- or both- take advantage of the opportunity the kitchen offers for expressing your wifely qualities in what you wear. Pinafores, organdies, and aprons look wonderful, as do gay cotton wrap-arounds that slip on over your dress while you make breakfast. Too much attention is paid to kitchen equipment and decor; too little to what is worn in this setting. Why look like Cinderella's crotchety stepmother when you can be a lyrical embodiment of all that a home and hearth means!

Don’t be fooled by clever hands, sir” the Sunlight Man said. He’d be lying with the back of his head on his hands, as he always lay. “Entertainment’s all very well, but the world is serious. It’s exceedingly amusing, when you think about it: nothing in life is as startling or shocking or mysterious as a good magician’s trick. That’s what makes stagecraft deadly. Listen closely, friend. You see great marvels performed on the stage - the lady sawed in half, the fat man supported by empty air, the Hindu vanishing with the folding of a cloth - and the subtlest of poisons drifts into your brain: you think the earth dead because the sky is full of spirits, you think the hall drab because the stage is adazzle with dimestore gilt. So King Lear rages, and the audience grows meek, and tomorrow, in the gray of old groceries, the housewife will weep for Cordelia and despair for herself. They weren’t fools, those old sages who called all art the Devil’s work. It eats the soul.

What are you going to do for a living? Yea, you're going to have to work because you can't be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can be a housewife. And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That's all you are if you don't talk. If you don't talk, you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair. You've got to let people know you have a personality and a brain. You think somebody is going to take care of you all your stupid life? You think you'll always have your big sister? You think somebody's going to marry you, is that it? Well you're not the type that gets dates, let alone gets married. Nobody's going to notice you. And you have to talk for interviews, speak right up in front of the boss. Don't you know that?

I found it enormously comforting to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, in bulky robes, puttering about the altar, washing up after having served so great a meal to so many people. It brought the mass home to me and gave it meaning. It welcomed me, a stranger, someone who did not know the responses of the mass, or even the words of the sanctus. After the experience of a liturgy that had left me feeling disoriented, eating and drinking were something I could understand. That and the housework. This was my first image of the mass, my door in, as it were, and it has served me well for years.

When Pat Schroeder, a Harvard Law graduate, ran for office in 1972, the headlines read "Housewife" or "Mother" runs for Congress. When facing one indignant male colleague after another who demanded how she could be both a member of Congress and a mother, she said, "Because I have a brain and a uterus and both work.

Granted, your hard-working hubby is doing his fair share just by bringing home the bacon. But by encouraging him to take on a couple of those tasks himself, he’ll soon have more respect for all you do on your family’s behalf. If his excuse for turning you down is that he’s “too tired” or that “it’s women’s work,” there is a simple way to convince him otherwise: food poisoning.

Soon after my husband and I started living together, he learned to make noise before coming into my writing space. He learned to do this because if he didn’t I would get startled and scream. That would startle him and he would scream. It was ‘Night of the Living Dead’ meets Edvard Munch till we worked things out. When I write, especially when the writing takes off, I fall into a trancelike state in which I dream with my eyes open. This is why I write. It is the opium I crave, this entry into another state of consciousness. I used to think it meant I was a great writer, that it was proof of my 'genius.' I also used to think it meant I was a nut who zapped into hallucination as soon as her husband shut the door – ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’ with computer. I now realize it merely means I am writing.

This determination that nurturing should become exclusively a concern of women served to signify to both sexes that neither nurture nor womanhood was very important. But the assignment to women of a kind of work that was thought both onerous and trivial was only the beginning of their exploitation. As the persons exclusively in charge of the tasks of nurture, women often came into sole charge of the household budget; they became family purchasing agents. The time of the household barterer was past. Kitchens were now run on a cash economy. Women had become customers, a fact not long wasted on the salesmen, who saw that in these women they had customers of a new and most promising kind. The modern housewife was isolated from her husband, from her school-age children, and from other women. She was saddled with work from which much of the skill, hence much of the dignity, had been withdrawn, and which she herself was less and less able to consider important. She did not know what her husband did at work, or after work, and she knew that her life was passing in his regardlessness and in his absence. Such a woman was ripe for a sales talk: this was the great commercial insight of modern times. Such a woman must be told — or subtly made to understand — that she must not be a drudge, that she must not let her work affect her looks, that she must not become “unattractive,” that she must always be fresh, cheerful, young, shapely, and pretty. All her sexual and mortal fears would thus be given voice, and she would be made to reach for money. What was implied was always the question that a certain bank finally asked outright in a billboard advertisement: “Is your husband losing interest?

I moved to the window, keeping my back to him. "Is it always an expression of freedom?" This time, I didn't wait for him to answer. "What if you've come to believe the options available to you are limited?" My chest rose and fell. "What if the way you think the world works is wrong? What if life taught you something false, or people lied to you, convinced you they knew better than you did? Can you really choose freely if you've been mistaught?

I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. What we fear is not so much our energy may be leaking away through small outlets as that it may be going “down the drain.” We do not see the results of our giving as concretely as man does his work. In the job of home-keeping there is no raise from the boss, and seldom praise from others to show us we have hit the mark. Except for the child, woman’s creation is often invisible, especially today.

When you are a mother and a homemaker, you are your own boss. The days are what you make of them. The tasks that need to get done are put on a list at your discretion. This means that you must be leadership material. At the same time, what you get done is up to you, too. You also have to be a hardworking employee. The part of you that decides where to go must work with the part of you that needs to go there. Making a list that you cannot accomplish does not make you a better housewife, it makes you a bad leader.

Just thinking about a job I lost.” “What? Someone didn’t hire you? Why not? Don’t they know you’re the best? Did you quote them too high? Wait, was it another one of those housewife’s wanting work done on their personal plumbing?” She arched a brow suggestively. Chris choked. “You did not just accuse me of being a handyman pimp.” “If the condom fits …” “You have a foul mouth. And to think you kiss your children with it.” “According to my mates, my mouth is perfect. And there’s nothing dirty about telling the truth.” Damn

In the nineteenth century, a young woman named Ellen Richards, trained in chemistry and unable to work in her field, announced the foundation of a new science she called oekology, or the science of living. This was the discipline later called domestic science or home economics, involving the effort to professionalize and dignify the work of the housewife by drawing on science and technology.* A single Greek root, oekos, has wandered through changing conceptions of human living, as well as changing fashions in spelling, producing the contemporary fields of economics and ecology, which frequently seem to be at odds. It also offers the less well-known term ekistics, coined by the city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to refer to a science of human settlement that would include the architectural creation of human spaces, their social and economic integration, and their relationship with the natural environment. Each of these latter-day coinages represents an incomplete view, but together they represent a view that includes biology and architecture, kitchens and stock exchanges, the growth of meadows and children as well as the GNP.

American cultural historians long thought that as male and female spheres became separated with the rise of industrialism, men practiced aggressive values in the commercial marketplace while women, confined to the home, took on qualities such as passivity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. To be sure, as Ann Douglas and Barbara Welter show, the ideal of the angelic, submissive housewife was purveyed in many novels and advice manuals. But partly in response to the forces driving women to domesticity and debility, more vigorous roles for women were defined. Nina Baym and others have noted the sturdiness often exhibited by the heroines of domestic novels, and Jane P. Tompkins stresses the power and cultural work achieved by popular writers like Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Frances B. Cogan shows that to counteract signs of sickliness and passivity among women, antebellum health advisers and popular writers held up the ideal of the tough, active woman—what Cogan calls the Real Woman. In health literature, this movement flowered in works like Dr. Dio Lewis’s New Gymnastics for Men, Women and Children (1863). In popular fiction, it gave rise to spirited heroines with the physical capabilities of men. For

The notion that women belong at home while men went out to work emerged in the nineteenth century, from the beginning it was the key way that elitist distinguished themselves from the working class. A man's ability to support his family signaled his status. Having a stay-at-home mom became something the working class aspired to. In the second half of the twentieth century, the U.S. attained the breadwinner-housewife ideal for two brief generations. By the twenty-first century, a new generation had lost the ability to sustain the ideal they had seen their parents and grandparents achieve. Small wonder many felt bereft.

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s? When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow—would it not be a singular allowance?—that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab’s, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

Burnout is very real. I see it in my practice on a daily basis. Men and women from every age and walk of life are so overwhelmed they can hardly function.” “Maybe they’re just working too hard.” “A common misconception. A person can suffer from burnout even if they’re a couch potato. You can burn out from being idle just like you can burn out from success. The common denominator is prolonged frustration.” “Spinning your wheels.” “Exactly. The feeling that no matter what you do you’re in the same place as you were yesterday. That there’s simply no reason to continue because you’d still be sunk in the same mire, running on the same treadmill, dancing the same tired dance. The housewife, the cop, the slacker, or the business tycoon can all suffer from burnout.” Cal

It would be hard. After all, I'm working. I'm a mother. Number one, I'm a mother & housewife, so there's the house kind of chores. In the evenings, I might attend some meeting, & then late at night, I would be either writing to the brothers & sisters in prison or working on the leaflets of their cases. Then on the weekend, at least every other weekend, we'd visit the political prisoners...I mean everybody has their whole life & things they have to do at home. But I'll tell you, we were busy during this time. Every week, more brothers & sisters would be arrested. We were working on scores of cases at the same time--trying to keep up with visiting, writing, attending court hearings. If I could show you all the leaflets we made, you'd get an idea of how expansive the work was.

Rob’s entire life was successfully laid out, his attributes taking center stage, his accolades only a few seconds shy of the next brilliant offer, and the next rave review. Our family life seemed happy, at least from the outside looking in, and why wouldn’t it? I was the dutiful little housewife, he was the brilliant plastic surgeon, and his daughters closed the circle of the perfect family. When he was gone, working late, patching people up, consulting on emergencies, with the children long asleep, I would often stare at myself in the mirror, and wonder how my life had gotten so far left of where I was once headed. My face, without makeup, was burdened with secrets, lines that threatened to one day reveal themselves like a roadmap of my unhappiness. But for all Rob’s planning, he couldn’t have anticipated that on the second day of August, at 5:45 a.m., his life was about to become completely and forever irreparably changed.

But the weakness of these proposals isn't that they're unworkable, or even that they're 'traditional,' but that they're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there's little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles—and there's no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between 'home' and 'work' that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.

Back in the day, physicians had to go through filing cabinets to find records and write notes and prescriptions by hand. Back in the day, office clerks had to run around the office with paper reports to track down their bosses for their approval. Back in the day, farmers planted by hand and harvested with sickles. What do these people have to whine about these days? No one is insensitive enough to say that. Every field has its technological advances and evolves in the direction that reduces the amount of physical labour required, but people are particularly reluctant to admit that the same is true for domestic labour. Since she became a full-time housewife, she often noticed that there was a polarised attitude regarding domestic labour. Some demeaned it as "bumming around at home", while others glorified it as "work that sustains life", but none tried to calculate its monetary value. Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay.

I threw out the paper, the bottles, the fantastic accumulation of trash, I examined the contents of the innumerable boxes and suitcases, and disposed of them. But I am not a housewife--men can never be housewives. And the pleasure was never real or deep, though Giovanni smiled his humble, grateful smile and told me in as many ways as he could find how wonderful it was to have me there, how I stood, with my love and my ingenuity, between him and the dark. Each day he invited me to witness how he had changed, how love had changed him, how he worked and sang and cherished me. I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

A well-heeled housewife confided that all the husbands in her social circle had recently accepted jobs in China, and were now commuting between Cupertino and Shanghai, partly because their quiet styles prevented them from advancing locally. The American companies “think they can’t handle business,” she said, “because of presentation. In business, you have to put a lot of nonsense together and present it. My husband always just makes his point and that’s the end of it. When you look at big companies, almost none of the top executives are Asians. They hire someone who doesn’t know anything about the business, but maybe he can make a good presentation.” A software engineer told me how overlooked he felt at work in comparison to other people, “especially people from European origin, who speak without thinking.” In China, he said, “If you’re quiet, you’re seen as being wise. It’s completely different here. Here people like to speak out. Even if they have an idea, not completely mature yet, people still speak out. If I could be better in communication, my work would be much more recognized. Even though my manager appreciates me, he still doesn’t know I have done work so wonderful.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW Collagist Fabe adds flair to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with 39 original illustrations that accompany the unabridged text. Fabe’s collages overlay bright, watercolor-washed scenes with retro cut-paper figures and objects sampled from fashion magazines from the 1930s to the ’50s. Accompanying each tableau is a quote from the Pride and Prejudice passage that inspired it. Like Austen’s book, Fabe’s work explores arcane customs of beauty and courtship, pageantry and social artifice: in one collage, a housewife holds a tray of drinks while a man sits happily with a sandwich in hand in the distance. While tinged with irony and more than a dash of social commentary, the collages nevertheless have a spirit of glee and evidence deep reverence for the novel. As Fabe describes in a preface, Austen “was a little bit mean—the way real people are mean—so there are both heroes and nincompoops. Family is both beloved and annoying. That is Austen’s genius, her ability to describe people in all their frailty and humor.” This is a sweet and visually appealing homage. (BookLife) “While tinged with irony and more than a dash of social commentary, the collages nevertheless have a spirit of glee and evidence deep reverence for the novel. As Fabe describes in a preface, Austen “was a little bit mean—the way real people are mean—so there are both heroes and nincompoops.” #publishersweeklyreview #booklife #elliefabe #janeausten #prideandprejudice #cincinnatiartist

Save thee, Timon. Tim. Now, thieves? All [Banditti]. Soldiers, not thieves. Tim. Both too, and women's sons. All [Banditti]. We are not thieves, but men that much do want. Tim. Your greatest want is, you want much of meat. Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots; Within this mile break forth a hundred springs; The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips; The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush Lays her full mess before you. Want! why want? 1. Ban. We cannot live on grass, on berries, water, As beasts and birds and fishes. Tim. Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds, and fishes; You must eat men. Yet thanks I must you con That you are thieves profess'd, that you work not In holier shapes: for there is boundless theft In limited professions. Rascal thieves, Here's gold. Go, suck the subtle blood o' the grape, Till the high fever seethe your blood to froth, And so 'scape hanging: trust not the physician; His antidotes are poison, and he slays Moe than you rob: take wealth and lives together; Do villany, do, since you protest to do't, Like workmen. I'll example you with thievery. The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun: The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen From general excrement: each thing's a thief: The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power Have uncheque'd theft. Love not yourselves: away, Rob one another. There's more gold. Cut throats: All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go, Break open shops; nothing can you steal, But thieves do lose it: steal no less for this I give you; and gold confound you howsoe'er! Amen. 3. Ban. Has almost charmed me from my profession, by persuading me to it. 1. Ban. 'Tis in the malice of mankind that he thus advises us; not to have us thrive in our mystery. 2 Ban. I'll believe him as an enemy, and give over my trade. 1 Ban. Let us first see peace in Athens: there is no time so miserable but a man may be true. Exeunt Thieves [the Banditti]

Because neither Ruth nor Charlotte was a housewife. Barbie, from the outset, worked—at both dream and humdrum jobs. She served drinks to thankless travelers as an American Airlines stewardess and emptied bedpans as a registered nurse.

you are a woman, forget about it. With all the cultural advancements, middle-class and professional women of this era have gained the freedom to have their own lives and careers without the need for marriage. Having a husband and kids isn’t a prerequisite to having a well-rounded, fulfilling adult life anymore. To be clear, I’m not saying that filling that traditional housewife role over being a professional is a bad thing to do today, and I know that the decisions women make about work are complicated. Also, I’m not saying that women who do choose careers hate their kids, etc. Am I clear here? I’M NOT SHITTING ON ANYONE’S LIFE CHOICE (unless the choice is to smoke crack and treat your kids like the Mo’Nique character treats Precious in the movie Precious). But what’s important is that more women than ever are able to make that choice for themselves. Even

The servant who takes an interest in her work seems no longer to exist, and in return for high wages we get but superficial service,’ bemoaned one editorial. ‘Where is the maid to be found who takes pride in the brilliance of the glass to be used on the table or remembers of her own initiative to darn the damask? Every sort of contrivance now lessens labour – carpet sweepers, knife machines, bathrooms, lifts – in spite of these the life of a housewife is one long wrestle and failure to establish order.

What if you're a woman," I said, feeling each word like fire in my throat, "and the world teaches you who you are, and where your place is, from the moment you're born, but all along, it's a lie. What if the lie chains you every day? If you're not thinking straight any minute of your life, and even your defiance, even your pleasure, is suspect?" I pressed my palm against the cold glass. "How does consent work then? What makes you want the things you want? Is it your choice, or were you molded?

View now with delight the works of your own hands, your fruit trees of all sorts, loaden with sweet blossoms, and fruit of all tastes, operations, and colors: your trees standing in comely order, which way soever you look. And the roots of your trees powdered with strawberries, red, white and green; what a pleasure this is!

I can’t get over the governor,” Jamie said. “He seemed so genuine. And he’s done so much good. I can’t imagine there’s something this broken inside him. How does he hide it?” “They’re not broken,” I said. “They’re working exactly like they’re supposed to.” I thought of what Nicole had said. “What the Paters teach about men and women is what a lot of the world already

self-leadership entails sharpening the leadership skills that you originally possess and the leader in you emerges forth to accomplish what is required of you more efficiently. For example, a simple housewife is a leader. She is a born leader, even as suppressed as she may be depending upon the society she belongs to or her circumstances, she does lead, and she takes the reigns of her household, trains her children in the ways of life, etc. Thereby every human has a leader hidden in them. Self-leadership is about recognizing your leadership traits, sharpening them, and putting them into action.

Not right that her work raising the child was devalued, women’s work, housework, that once she became a housewife she began, ever so slowly, to disappear, until she only fully existed in the presence of her ward. When she considered how she spent each day, it was fair to wonder: without him, did she even exist at all?

Feminist scholarship has documented that the positive benefits masses of women have gained by entering the workforce have more to do with increased self-esteem and positive participation in community. No matter her class the woman who stayed at home working as a housewife was often isolated, lonely, and depressed.

For decades, for the housewife, keeping a tidy, loving home had been a task deeply tied up with her identity. To fail to keep a good home was to fail to be a good woman.

Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who'd neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn't until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

Why would you want to work when you don't have to? "At some point, you have to do things for yourself," Jane says to Mei. "You'll understand once you've been worked like a dog and can't even keep track of which days you've showered." ... Mei takes this in. "It's so weird. You get good grades in high school so you can get into a good college. Then you go to a good college so you can get a good job. I thought that was the endgame." Jane laughs. "That's the endgame of your youth. Then you start learning all those things you were working so hard for don't actually make you happy...

The whole effect was classic housewife meets naughty nerd, and it worked like a fucking treat.

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way. But a job, any job, is not the answer—in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to “help out at home” or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.

In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The author spoke to middle-class White women, bored in suburbia (an escape hatch from increasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to work at a “meaningful” job outside the home. Not only were the problems of the White suburban housewife (who may have had Black domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to them. Friedan’s observation that “I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children” seemed to come from another planet.

He didn’t call on Monday. “Pay up,” she said. “He’ll call,” Mike said. “He took a pinky pledge.” Mike made a good point, but how long could even a sacred vow sealed by the tiniest and most loyal of digits forestall the inevitable? They decided to give it a month. Tuesday morning the phone rang. “Hello,” said an increasingly familiar British voice. “Oh, hello,” Becky said, and thought both “darn” and “hooray!” at the same time. She hated to lose a bet. “Yes, hello,” said Felix. Becky cleared her throat. “Did you go skiing?” “Yes, you know, we did.” “Have a good time?” “Mm hmm.” “Good. Sounds . . . fun.” “So, what do we do now, swap stories about our exes? Watch a reality show on the telly and narrate to each other in scandalized voices? ‘Can you believe she said that? I can’t believe she just said that.’ ” “You don’t have many friends, do you?” “I have thousands of fans, dozens of itinerant co-workers, a handful of acolytes, three stalkers, and a wife.” “You have no idea how this friend business works, do you?” she asked. “Ha!” Felix said. “Ooh, that was a nice ‘ha.’ Full of derisive laughter and effectively evading any answer.” “Thank you. I’ve been practicing.” “Yeah. So, um, you have no idea how this works, do you?” “I know there’s talking involved, don’t I? And phone calling. I’m not such an amateur as all that.” “Felix, are you really sure you want to be friends?” “What do you mean, am I sure? I took a pinky pledge.

It was another beautiful crisp, clear day, in what has always been considered picturesque Überlingen. The village was internationally known for its traditional beauty and was a popular vacation destination long before the war. As usual, there was just a hint of a breeze off the brilliantly blue lake and I could understand why so many Germans would come here for their urlaub or vacation. Having a little money left over from the last check sent by Mina, I found a nice room for the three of us, overlooking the lake at a classy resort hotel. For the next two days we lived quite comfortably in our new surroundings. In fact we even enjoyed a real hot bath, something that I had almost forgotten. As I soaked in the warm, sudsy water I could hear my children laughing and giggling in the next room, and longed for a time when the world would be at peace again. During the day we walked along the shore of the beautiful Bodensee, but in the back of my mind, I knew that this was nothing more than a horrible illusion and couldn’t last; besides I had to find work. In reality, the children and I would have to settle in somewhere so that we could find some sort of stability. It was also important that they enroll in a school again. That “somewhere” turned out to be a room in a house owned by two old ladies who took in boarders. The old house faced the railroad station and was quaint in the old world style. It fit right into the picture postcard appearance of romantic Überlingen. Erika, the younger of the two ladies, was very kind and helpful to me. There were also two other tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Koestoll. He was German and she seemed to be what could be considered a typical French housewife, who devoted her life to her German husband. Herr Koestoll, was old and feeble and they sustained themselves on a very small pension. In fact it was so bad that he couldn’t even afford shoes. However their happiness didn’t seem to depend on money. I grew very fond of them for the short time that we knew each other.

even as they challenged the myth of domesticity by depicting work as the cure for "housewifeitis," they reinforced gender inequalities by emphasizing the secondary nature of temp jobs-and temporary workers

Jan was born in a small town outside of Kiev, Ukraine. He was an only child. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction manager. When Koum was sixteen, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, mainly to escape the anti-semitic environment of their homeland. Unfortunately, Jan’s father never made the trip. He got stuck in the Ukraine, where he eventually died years later. His mother swept the floors of a grocery store to make ends meet, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer. They barely survived off her disability insurance. It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous childhood, but he made it through. After college, Jan applied to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He spent nine years building his skills at Yahoo, and then applied to work at Facebook. Unfortunately, he was rejected. In 2009, Jan bought an iPhone and realized there was an opportunity to build something on top of Apple’s burgeoning mobile platform. He began building an app that could send status updates between devices. It didn’t do very well at first, but then Apple released push notifications. All of the sudden, people started getting pinged when statuses were updated. And then people began pinging back and forth. Jan realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service. The app continued to grow, but Jan kept quiet. He didn’t care about headlines or marketing buzz. He just wanted to build something valuable, and do it well. By early 2011, his app had reached the top twenty in the U.S. app store. Two years later, in 2013, the app had 200 million users. And then it happened: In 2014, Jan’s company, WhatsApp, was acquired by Facebook―the company who had rejected him years earlier―for $19 billion. I’m not telling this story to insinuate that you should go build a billion-dollar company. The remarkable part of the story isn’t the payday, but the relentless hustle Jan demonstrated throughout his entire life. After surviving a tumultuous childhood, he practiced his craft and built iteratively. When had had a product that was working, he stayed quiet, which takes extreme discipline. More often than not, hustling isn’t fast or showy. Most of the time it’s slow and unglamorous―until it’s not. 

Another thing you need to understand is what we now call the “core competencies” of your organization. What are we really good at? What do our customers pay us for? Why do they buy from us? In a competitive, nonmonopolistic market—and that is what the world has become—there is absolutely no reason why a customer should buy from you rather from your competitor. None. He pays you because you give him something that is of value to him. What is it that we get paid for? You may think this is a simple question. It is not. I have been working with some of the world’s biggest manufacturers, producers, and distributors of packaged consumer goods. All of you use their products, even in Slovenia. They have two kinds of customers. One, of course, is the retailer. The other is the housewife. What do they pay for? I have been asking this question for a year now. I do not know how many companies in the world make soap, but there are a great many. And I can’t tell the difference between one kind of soap or the other. And why does the buyer have a preference—and a strong one, by the way? What does it do for her? Why is she willing to buy from one manufacturer when on the same shelves in the United States or in Japan or in Germany they are soaps from other companies? She usually does not even look at them. She reaches out for that one soap. Why? What does she see? What does she want? Try to work on this. Incidentally, the best way to find out is to ask customers not by questionnaire but by sitting down with them and finding out. The most successful retailer I know in the world is not one of the big retail chains. It is somebody in Ireland, a small country about the size of Slovenia. This particular company is next door to Great Britain with its very powerful supermarkets, and all of them are also in Ireland. And yet this little company has maybe 60 percent of the sandwich market. What do they do? Well, the answer is that the boss spends two days each week in one of his stores serving customers, from the meat counter to the checkout counter, and is the one who puts stuff into bags and carries it out to the shoppers’ automobiles. He knows what the customers pay for. But let me go back to the beginning: The place to start managing is not in the plant, and it is not in the office. You start with managing yourself by finding out your own strengths, by placing yourself where your strengths can produce results and making sure that you set the right example (which is basically what ethics is all about), and by placing your people where their strengths can produce results.

The women seemed more industrious than the men, for they were housekeepers; and the noise of the Indian housewife patting her tortillas in preparation for breakfast was the only sound that ever broke the silence of our quiet morning rides. For what need have men to work in a land of perpetual summer, where fruits grow wild, and a small piece of ground will produce frijoles and corn, their sole living; where branches and stout vines from the woods furnish the framework of their houses, mud the covering, and palm leaves the thatching for the roof? They come up idle and careless in the sunshine, marry, grow old and die never having advanced a step beyond their fathers, nor, to all appearance, had a longing for better things. Yet there was never a more docile, kind-hearted happy people in the world, and who shall say they are not much better off than we, with our artificial wants, and strivings after the impossible? (pge 107)

What if, Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was more than just about housewifely ennui but also about the alienation and unending tedium of all modern work - of a moneymaking need that expands to fill the time available? Why else this constant repetition and reinforcement of a fiction that reality keeps refuting but that fiction keeps reimposing: the fiction of progress, the feeling that we are going somewhere, getting somewhere, that our lives have meaning, that we are not caught in a constant recursion, an infinite loop? Is there progress? What is progress? What if author Ira Levin was not ripping off Betty Friedan but was on her side? What if he was calling back to her, saying, 'I feel you, sister! Fuck the patriarchy!' What if, as Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was an allegory for the lives not just of suburban housewives but of global corporate capitalism? of working ceaselessly with nothing to show for it at the end? What if it represented anxieties about lives of pointless repetition with no progress, no end result, and no possibility of transformation? If it wasn't just the housewives' problem, or a problem caused by housewives who ceased to perform their housewifely duties, but everyone's problem? What if 'the problem that has no name turns out to be caused by the life that has no more plot?

A (house)wife now performs the tasks once distributed between servants of different rank or undertaken by the maid of all work. Her ‘core’ jobs are cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing-up, laundering and ironing.44 She also looks after her children, frequently cares for aged parents or other relatives, and is sometimes incorporated to a greater or lesser degree as an unpaid assistant in her husband’s work. This aspect of being a wife is visible in many small shops or in the activities of the wives of clergymen and politicians, but the same service is provided, less visibly, to husbands in all kinds of occupations. A wife, for example, contributes research assistance (to male academics), acts as hostess (to a business man’s clients), answers the phone and keeps the books (for a small business man).45 However, as Christine Delphy has argued, to list the tasks of a housewife tells us only so much. The list cannot explain why exactly the same services can be bought in the market, or why a particular task is performed without pay by a wife, yet she would get paid for providing the service if she worked, for example, in a restaurant or for a firm of contract cleaners.46 The problem is not that wives perform valuable tasks for which they are not paid (which has led some feminists to argue for state payment or wages for housework). Rather, what being a woman (wife) means is to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband). In short, the marriage contract and a wife’s subordination as a (kind of) labourer, cannot be understood in the absence of the sexual contract and the patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres.

The Lance deHaven-Smith book Conspiracy Theory in America (published by the University of Texas) reveals that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was invented by the CIA to discredit doubters of the Warren Commission, which claims that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was carried out alone by a single “lone gunman.” Distraught by the murder of President Kennedy, a Beverly Hills housewife named Mae Brussell took it upon herself to buy all 26 printed volumes issued by the Warren Commission report, and attempt to make sense of the thing by cross-indexing the entire work. Mae was disturbed by the contradictory information and unreported realities she discovered in those volumes. As a result, she started subscribing to many major newspapers and magazines, whose stories she filed and organized, uncovering disquieting connections and patterns behind government and corporate malfeasance.

Accept success as a good thing, and invite it into your life. Set today as the starting point for a new life. Every race starts at one point. Every building starts with one stone. Every great work, every dream, every great achievement starts somewhere. The march of a thousand miles begins with one step, said Confucius. Everyone, absolutely everyone, have to start the walk somewhere. It does not matter where you are right now. It does not matter if you are a student, a professional, a housewife, a peasant coming to the city looking for a better life. It does not matter if you are unemployed and out of work (or as I like to refer to it: awaiting for a really wonderful and transformative life experience that I was not having in my former employment). What matters is not if you have a lot or have a little; but what you decide to do with what you have.

My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done. Like a housewife’s, a manager’s work is never done.

I didn’t understand about alcoholism yet, how booze and drugs fed the wounded animal in Walter, I just thought that’s how life was. Unpredictable and insane. I’d show up to school the day after one of his episodes feeling shell-shocked and spaced out. I don’t know how I manifested this stuff outwardly, but I never talked to anyone about it. I just wandered around in a daze, stuck in a severe hangover. I had no idea how to deal with it. I was very conscious of the things I loved about my family—the freedom of all of us walking around the house naked, Walter being a musician, the amazing jazz I heard, the well-stocked book and record shelves, the bohemian aspects of our life. But I’d lie in bed at night and wish that I had a boring, normal, dumb family. One with no creativity. I wished my dad worked in a factory, and my mom was a conservative housewife who wore ugly pantsuits. I wished they’d have petty arguments and watch TV; the way Archie Bunker and Edith behaved on the TV show All in the Family, or like the Battaglias back in Larchmont. I equated creativity with insanity.

Observing Colette made me question my mother’s dreams. Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

Housewife does not mean you are married to a house. It means you are a woman who is married to a husband and your husband goes off to work every day and you don’t go off to work at all but embark on house-dusting, house-hoovering and various ironing and washing duties and other things that happen in a house, and in fact you aren’t really expected to go out of the house at all except to get yourself to a supermarket and then you go up and down the aisles with a trolley and a list, looking sad. What a lot of things are embedded in that housewife word.

The part of me that enjoys housekeeping and the comforts it provides is central to my character. Until now, I have almost entirely concealed this passion for domesticity. No one meeting me for the first time would suspect that I squander my time knitting or my mental reserves remembering household facts such as the date when the carpets and mattresses were last rotated. Without thinking much about it, I knew I would not want this information about me to get around. After all, I belong to the first generation of women who worked more than they stayed home. We knew that no judge would credit the legal briefs of a housewife, no university would give tenure to one, no corporation would promote one, and no one who mattered would talk to one at a party.

We have been conditioned by today's advertising to respond instantly to the word "housewife" with the word "drudgery". ... A creative Counterpart is more than just a helper. She is a woman who having chosen (or have found herself in) the vocation of wife and mother, decides to learn and grow in all the areas this role and to work as hard as if she were aiming for the presidency of corporation. Functioning as a professional in all areas of marriage is the essence of being a creative counterpart.

The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills—a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to forty-eight hours and the bright new world of mass leisure, while they themselves were still working the seven-day-a-week, dawn-to-dark schedule their fathers and grandfathers had worked; a mocking echo to Hill Country housewives who read of the myriad new labor-saving devices (washing machines, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators) that had “freed” the housewife. Even if they had been able to afford such devices, they would not have been able to switch them on since the Hill Country was still without electricity.

While it does not in any way diminish the importance of women resisting sexist oppression by entering the labor force, work has not been a liberating force for masses of American women. And for some time now, sexism has not prevented them from being in the work force. White middle and upper class women like those described in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique were housewives not because sexism would have prevented them from being in the paid labor force, but because they had willingly embraced the notion that it was better to be a housewife than to be a worker.

Mom wasn’t a weak person, or a wisp of a domineered housewife who hid in the background. Far from it. She was a vivacious, funny, and smart woman who loudly voiced her opinions, and would’ve been a suffragette had she lived in the twenties. She was gorgeous, with shoulder-length brown hair and beautiful brown eyes. She was strong and was an athlete as a teenager. She smoked, drank, and laughed out loud. A vital presence. She just never did understand or relate to children. She left school as a teenager and worked full-time in an office, then married young and became a mother and housewife. Now she found herself in New York in the swinging sixties, and despite my dad’s best efforts to make her the perfect square wife, she was energized, curious, and had time on her hands. She took music lessons, looked longingly at the bohemian lifestyle, and went off alone to the Newport Jazz Festival to see Miles Davis. Not about to be the happy homemaker, she wanted to party.

Mom wasn’t a weak person, or a wisp of a domineered housewife who hid in the background. Far from it. She was a vivacious, funny, and smart woman who loudly voiced her opinions, and would’ve been a suffragette had she lived in the twenties. She was gorgeous, with shoulder-length brown hair and beautiful brown eyes. She was strong and was an athlete as a teenager. She smoked, drank, and laughed out loud. A vital presence. She just never did understand or relate to children. She left school as a teenager and worked full-time in an office, then married young and became a mother and housewife. Now she found herself in New York in the swinging sixties, and despite my dad’s best efforts to make her the perfect square wife, she was energized, curious, and had time on her hands. She took music lessons, looked longingly at the bohemian lifestyle, and went off alone to the Newport Jazz Festival to see Miles Davis. Not about to be the happy homemaker, she wanted to party. Dad never became rich, and I’ve been told some blame fell upon my mom for failing to help him climb the career ladder. Instead of standing by her man, she acquired hippie habits, wore dashikis, and was a lousy teammate at cocktail parties.

In 1908, the great Russian actress Alla Nazimova played Nora in New York in performances that became legendary. In the audience was Halvdan Koht, who describes Nazimova in the last scene acting “with a passionate intensity that made Nora’s transformation at the end completely an inner reality, conveyed in low-pitched, emotion-laden words” (K 323). Koht recalls his horror when members of the audience, mistaking “the work of art” for “a collection of ideas,” began to applaud Nora’s every line “as though it were a political harangue” (K 323). But while not a harangue, Nora’s words are nevertheless resoundingly political, for in representing the “inner reality” of an obscure Norwegian housewife, they constitute a discourse of recognition for every woman who has ever lived her life for a man, and by Nora’s count, there are “millions.” Displaying what the modern theatre condemns as bad manners, the 1908 audience was responding to Ibsen’s powerful feminist poetry, the exhilarating promise that on the other side of the doll house, women, no less then men, could learn to take themselves seriously: “I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being, no less than you — or anyway, I ought to try to become one” (193). The universality of A Doll House does not come from “its demand for truth in every human relation” (K 323), but in its demand for equality in the relation between women and men.

The survey of the time spent in the home by most housewives established that, on average, they worked 75 hours a week, with overtime on Saturdays and Sundays. This did not take into account that a number of women were also doing part or full-time work outside the home.